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Friday, January 22, 2010

Invisible Hand

It was an ADD sort of creating day. I leaped from one thing to another and back again repeatedly, not really getting any one thing done. I also obsessed on etsy most recent change/move. In an attempt to make everyone happy, they are trying to create a relevancy search. They realize that change makes us wet ourselves, so they've opted to try out 'Relevancy Thursdays' in an effort to gain data and I suppose improve the algorithm involved. I do think that is it ironic that they are trying to mimic the google search whilst google implements recency results. Anyway, I digress...again. The unfortunate basis of the relevancy seems to be our our titles, descriptions and tags. When I looked up tatting, the only tatting on the first page was at the bottom buried by things like puddy tat glass, which had that in the title, the tags and the sellers name, and not, not tatting. Hell, that wasn't even tattooing, which did make up a large portion of the results as well.

My own person pieces, pages back...pages. You can see why I'd be annoyed. The way to fool this new search apparently, is to add your most effective search term to your titles, your tags and your descriptions, but frankly that's not only a lot of effort, but if feels wrong. I like my cleverly named pieces. I like my short effective descriptions, but I'd also like to actually be found. My views were not down for the day, though that might be due to my own search experiments, but I made no sales and heard others puzzled at the results as well. There were those you sell similar products with similar tags, titles and descriptions, yet appear no where near each other in the search, so what is the formula to be found. Of course, we can't all be on the front of these results, but it would be nice if a tatting search yielded, you know...tatting. Of course the other fear is that unscrupulous people will add unrelated, but popular search terms to all their tags, titles and descriptions destroying other peoples chances of being found. Without the sheer man power to police this issue, I fear we're down a very bad rabbit hole indeed.

I did work on my gloves for a bit in the afternoon. I married the fingers together creating at first a frightening Frankenstein monster hand. Really, they are going together well and next up is the hardest bit so far. I want to attach them to a slave bracelet design, but I'm not certain the best way to fill in the empty space. I think I might just continue the current weave pattern and see if I can find the best attachment points, but really, I just need to do it, thinking and plotting is not helping at this point.

Back to work on the spat that I thought I was done with. I scrapped the side designs as well, they were too, I don't know, predictable. Instead, I took the motif I used to fill in the center bottom and modified that to do the job of the current side motifs. Then I struck a wall. Not a design wall, but a color one. As I am trying to create a matching set with mystery pieces, I was using said matching color. As the ball is wearing done, I went online to order more of this color. I noted that the tag on the ball is old...I had bought the thread some time ago, it also had no numbered color code, no matter I can match the color. Nope. I fear this is a discontinued color and I see nothing it's like anywhere. It's a cebelia in a medium brown shade. It's darker than the coffee cream and I can see nothing darker than that until we reach the royale thread in a chocolate brown which is far too dark. It's my own fault of course for getting ahead of myself. I've ordered every brown toned shade of cebelia that they had hoping that perhaps the online color swatches are horribly off, but I'm pretty sure I'm screwed here. I searched for a while trying to locate a list of discontinued colors or something, but I got nowhere. I suppose there's a slight chance that my hand dying thread angel can reproduce the color or at least a similar one, but the cost for that is much higher than store bought.

Oh, well, I'm just rambling again. I am still waiting on emails, so I'll just stay in a holding pattern, work with what I have and hope for the best.

1 comment:

I can sympathize. I had that kind of week, where it seemed like I was scattered and ineffectual, two of my least favorite things to be. I'm not sure about the relevancy changes, either, and wonder about the importance placed on titles, rather than on materials and tags. Hopefully, it will work out to benefit those of us who do things fairly correctly.